Haredi insularity is now untenable

Two major policy issues that the government and Knesset grappled with in the past week are highlighting the fundamental realization that Israel’s semi-autonomic haredi minority can no longer continue to cordon itself off from the rest of society.

The first is haredi exemption from IDF service. Politicians from all three haredi parties in the Knesset – Shas, Degel Hatorah, and Agudat Yisrael – are unwilling to budge despite the IDF’s acute need for manpower. Nor are their spiritual leaders.

Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef on Saturday night said that yeshiva students should leave Israel rather than join the IDF, and one of Degel Hatorah’s spiritual leaders, Rabbi Meir Tzvi Bergman, said the same.

Behind closed doors, some haredi politicians, particularly from Shas, have expressed more nuanced approaches, such as a gradual increase of military-age haredi men into IDF units adapted to their needs, including, stringent dietary laws (kashrut) and gender segregation. All, however, insist that full-time yeshiva students should be given an exemption.

The most liberal haredi politicians are willing to consider plans that were on the table before October 7. But this may not be enough to cover the IDF’s needs.

The spectrum within the haredi population is broader on both ends. Some haredi civilians are eager to join the IDF – and there are others, such as the extremist Peleg Yerushalmi, who protested with signs that said, “We would rather die than join the army.” But still, Israel requires a paradigm shift that haredi leaders currently are clearly unwilling to entertain.

The second is haredi education. Haredi leaders insist on maintaining the independence of their education systems, which they believe to be of utmost importance in enshrining haredi identity. Israel’s Netanyahu-led governments have been very generous to these education systems over the years, often without demanding that that they provide basic life skills, such as English and mathematics, that would allow them to possibly get a job.

In the adapted budget, which is likely to pass this week, the government is conditioning extra funding for these school systems upon them meeting several requirements – such as teaching core curriculum subjects and enabling Education Ministry oversight.

Here, too, the haredi leaders seem unwilling to budge. Degel Hatorah chairman MK Moshe Gafni, who is also the Knesset Finance Committee chairman, refused this week to hold votes on several tax hikes and budget tweaks in the budget aimed at increasing national income, in protest at the government’s demands.

The committee scrambled to package those provisions into a separate bill to remove an obsacle to the passage of the budget. The common denominator in haredi opposition to Education Ministry oversight and IDF service is the fear that this will lead young haredim to abandon their community.

The blurring of the lines between the haredi community and the rest of Israel’s Jews is viewed as a threat to haredi identity and to Torah study, a central tenet of that identity.

This fear is tangible and no matter the lengths to which the IDF goes to accommodate haredim, joining the IDF would throw the haredim into Israel’s melting pot and the same is true in a broader education curriculum.

Perhaps for the first time in Israel’s history, the consequences of the haredi refusal to integrate are tangible and immediate. The IDF needs more soldiers and Israel cannot afford to continue pouring money into systems that do not create economic growth.